THE ANGLO-PORTUGUESE ALLIANCE WAS ESTABLISHED 648 YEARS AGO

 

The Anglo-Portuguese alliance was born out of converging strategic interests: An alliance between France and Castile in 1369 had caused great concern at the English court. Through the alliance with Castile, which had one of the largest fleets in Western Europe, France had access to Castilian sea power. Therefore closer union with Castile’s western neighbor Portugal was a logical step to counter this threat. 

 

Added to this was a dynastic interest as the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, had a legitimate claim to the throne of Castile through his wife, Constance, daughter of Pedro I (1334-1369). With military victory in the Iberian Peninsula and a Plantagenet on the Castilian throne, it would only be a matter of time before France would be forced to the negotiating table. 

 

The treaty was signed on June 16, 1373 between King Edward III of England and King Fernando and Queen Leonor of Portugal. It established a treaty of "perpetual friendships, unions [and] alliances" between the two nations. 

Battle of Aljubarrota from A Batalha graphic novel by Pedro Massano, 2014.

 

In the aftermath, England sent a failed expedition to Portugal in 1381-2 under Edmund of Langley in an attempt to push Castile out of the war. Undisciplined English troops caused outrage by raiding Portuguese towns and killing inhabitants whilst exclusion from Portuguese-Castilian peace negotiations in 1382 drew English resentment. 

 

After the death of King Fernando I, Joao of Aviz sent ambassadors to England to request permission to recruit mercenaries. The Portuguese ambassador Fernando Afonso de Albuquerque, Master of the Portuguese military order of Sant'Iago da Espada succeeded initially in raising only a modest force of approximately 800 Anglo-Gascon troops. Nevertheless these soldiers would play a laudable role in the eventual defeat and withdrawal of Castilian forces from Portugal particularly with their contribution to the victory over Castilian troops at the battle of Aljubarrota (14th August 1385). 

Treaty of alliance between king Edward III of England and Fernando I of Portugal, 16th June 1373 (British National Archives: E 30-275)

Joao I was recognized as the undisputed King of Portugal, putting an end to the interregnum of the 1383–1385 Crisis. The Treaty of Windsor in 1386 established a pact of mutual support between the countries.

 

Although not invoked until several centuries later, the terms of the alliance were to be called upon during the 18th and 19th centuries when Portuguese independence was again threatened. In 1762 Anglo-Portuguese forces successfully defeated a Spanish invasion force and again during the Peninsula war of 1808-1814, Anglo-Portuguese troops under the Duke of Wellington thwarted Napoleon’s attempts to conquer Portugal, most notably at the battle of Buçaco (27 September 1810) which allowed Viscount Wellington and Portuguese General Luís do Rego Barreto to resume the retreat of their 52,000 men into the previously fortified Lines of Torres Vedras, a contiguous line of fortifications extending from the Tagus River to the ocean.  

Brigadier-General Robert Craufurd and the 52nd at Buçaco, 27th September 1810 by Christa Hook. The Royal Green Jackets Museum, Winchester.

 

 

 

COLONIZATION, WARS AND SLAVERY: HOW THE TRANSATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE STARTED IN 1518

Bartolomé de Las Casas explained how the African transatlantic slave trade actually started in the West Indies: In August 1518, for 25,000 ducats, Flemish Baron Laurent de Gorrevod, of H.R.E Carlos V’s private Council, granted a license to abduct and transport 4,000 Africans from islands situated in the Gulf of Guinea to the Antilles to the brothers Centurione, Genoese bankers in Seville. These bankers, in turn, sold their license to various settlers, making a profit of some 275,000 ducats (Historia de Indias, 1527-1547, Book III).

Théodore de Bry, African slaves working in mines in the New World

In 1528 a similar license was granted to Bartholomeus Welser, a powerful German banker of Augsburg who claimed to descend from Byzantine general Flavius Belisarius! Carlos V provided the Welsers with privileges within the African slave trade as a reward for their financial contributions to his Imperial election in 1519. In 1523 they started their own production of sugar in Santo Domingo and were granted the entire Venezuela in March 1528. 

 

The number of sugar mills boomed, and so did the number of grants to traffic enslaved Africans from West African chiefdoms in exchange for brass and guns. “As a result, the Portuguese, who had long been capturing black slaves in Guinea, for whom the Spanish paid good prices, increased the trade by whatever means possible and the Africans themselves, seeing the demand, warred among themselves to sell slaves to the Portuguese”.

A King (Oba) of Benin receiving Portuguese traders in the 16th century by Angus McBride. According to Duarte Pacheco Pereira (Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis, 1506), the Benin Oba “was usually at war with its neighbors and takes many captives, whom we buy at 12 or 15 brass bracelets each."

 

Some of the enslaved Africans “escaped their misery by fleeing to the woods and from there cruelly attacked the Spaniards” such that “no small Spanish settlement was safe…”.

At the end of the 1540s, Las Casas, who had promoted the replacement of Indigenous slavery by African slavery, eventually changed his mind. He recognized that the Portuguese actions against Africans in Guinea were no less unjust than the Spanish against Indigenous Americans in the New World.